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Who is the most disliked commissioner in sports?

Replacement refs blew the calls, but Roger Goodell got the blame. The NFL commissioner was excoriated by columnists, mocked by players and chastised by fans as the labor crisis lurched to its wobbly conclusion

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Replacement refs blew the calls, but Roger Goodell got the blame. The NFL commissioner was excoriated by columnists, mocked by players and chastised by fans as the labor crisis lurched to its wobbly conclusion this week.

Sports commissioners have among the most difficult and scrutinized jobs in the corporate world and they inevitably take the heat when collective bargaining issues interfere with games. The NHL lockout that threatens its season does not endear Gary Bettman to fans who already boo him even in his celebratory role of awarding the Stanley Cup.

"These are the most public chief executive officer jobs in the world," says Robert Boland, professor of sports business at New York University. "No chief executive of any Fortune 500 company answers to as many vocal shareholders, an unruly coalition of owners who can have them removed. And none of them have to answer to a public or a press that second-guesses them nearly as much."

Goodell was picked as the most disliked commissioner in a USA TODAY/Gallup poll of 422 sports fans who named a commissioner. The tally: Goodell, 38%; the NBA's David Stern, 21%; Bettman, 20%; baseball's Bud Selig, 16%; all equally, 5%. The margin of error is plus or minus seven percentage points.

The poll was conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, in the heat of the replacement controversy and before the NFL reached agreement with its locked-out regular refs. "I didn't even need to hear the choices when I heard the question," says Amy Gold of Burke, Va., who chose Goodell.

To be fair, fans are often predisposed to be against commissioners. "They're kind of set up in a position for everyone to be against them," Denver Broncos safety Jim Leonhard says.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's first commissioner, set the template for what the public thinks of as the job of a commissioner: Work for the good of the game.

That notion is but quaint memory. Commissioners work for owners now.

William A. Sutton, director of the University of South Florida Sport and Entertainment Management program, once worked for Stern and tells a story demonstrating that commissioners understand this very well.

"When I went to work for the commissioner," Sutton recalls, "he asked me what his job was. Not knowing any better, I said, 'You're commissioner of the National Basketball Association.' And he proceeded to tell me that, no, he was an investment banker. And that his job was to grow the values of his investors."

The contentious nature of collective bargaining often casts commissioners in a negative light. It wasn't always that way. Boland points out that Pete Rozelle, who set the mold for commissioners in the TV age, "allowed an organism inside the NFL, the management council, to kind of manage (labor relations). He didn't get into the nitty-gritty of the dirty fight."

USA TODAY Sports asked to speak to commissioners of the four major team sports for this story. Goodell, Selig and Stern declined. Bettman was unavailable until next week.

Ten or 15 years ago, a poll might well have found Selig as most disliked, following 1994's lost World Series. But baseball currently enjoys an era of labor peace.

"Isn't it funny that the sport that had eight work stoppages from 1972 to 1994 has such a wonderfully rosy picture?" Boland says. "I give Bud high marks."

Boland also gives high marks to Stern, for the entirety of his career, and to Goodell, who faces the most difficult road ahead given the NFL's concussion crisis. Bettman gets an incomplete due to the ongoing lockout, Boland says.

"While fans may be critical of all of them, I'm enormously impressed by the complexity and range of issues they've dealt with," Boland says, "and how successfully they have dealt with most of them. Each of the incumbents has grown their sport in the time they've been in charge of it."

Selig even gets high grades from his predecessor, Fay Vincent, who resigned in 1992 after receiving a no-confidence vote from MLB owners, including Selig, who owned the Milwaukee Brewers.

"David Stern may have been the most successful commissioner of my lifetime," Vincent says. "Although Pete Rozelle is certainly a major candidate and I think Selig may be a candidate. What he has done is literally astonishing. … One of the most important things a commissioner can produce is stability and the (baseball) union signed a 10-year agreement and that is really a remarkable achievement."

Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop John McDonald, who has served on the players union board, spreads around the kudos: "You have to give credit to everyone involved where our game has come since that last strike, and a lot of that goes back to Bud."

As for Selig's salary being close to $30 million, making him the second-highest paid person in baseball behind the New York Yankees' Alex Rodriguez, McDonald figures that's fair enough. "Well, players are getting paid well, too," he says. "You can't put a price on leadership.''

Vincent says baseball's annual revenue from all sources was around $1.8 billion during his time and that it is approaching $7 billion now.

"So that's remarkable financial growth largely due to television and the Internet," Vincent says. "Now, you can say he was just fortunate to be there, but nevertheless if the job is to make enormous returns for your investors, your owners, then that's what Selig has done. So I think that people can carp about steroids, and there are a number of other things that one can be fairly concerned about in Selig's tenure, but on balance he's produced a terrific achievement."

Vincent, like Boland, thinks the specter of concussions means that Goodell faces the greatest difficulty of his commissioner brethren.

"Right now he is trying to protect the sport against what I see as an existential threat in terms of the health risk of players," Vincent says. "If that problem is not dealt with in a satisfactory manner, the sport can't survive. … No sport is more successful than football, but no sport is as seriously threatened as football."

Boland recalls the recent death of NFL Films' Steve Sabol, who "created the mythology for the sport. Well, that myth needs a happy ending. The concussion issue, and sustainability of the game, is the biggest issue for Goodell. His taking the lead on that is a visionary position."

Landis, baseball's first commissioner in 1920, remains the archetype. He was named in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. Landis was given full powers to act in the best interests of the game to restore the confidence of the paying public.

"Landis creates the role of what a commissioner is and he creates it as a judicial function, which makes a lot of sense: He was a judge," Boland says. "He creates a role where he is a neutral third party, almost the judicial branch of the game, living on Mount Olympus, doling out best-interest decisions."

Boland says to think of it this way: Landis is like George Washington in that he was the first. And every commissioner since, like every president since, faces an ever more complex and increasingly difficult job.

"I don't think Goodell has had an easy day as commissioner," Boland says. "Baseball is in the calmest seas right now so you've got to rate Selig high. I can't put the NFL much below that. And I think Stern has met most of his challenges and is managing. Bettman is in the arena right now.

"My supposition is Stern and Selig will be off the stage by the next time around. That'll be interesting to see who fills their chairs."

Selig is 78, in the late innings of his career. Stern turned 70 last week. Their jobs will be open one of these days. The help-wanted ads might go something like this: